Zmanda Recovery Manager 3.0 for MySQL on Ubuntu Server

“For large databases you may want to use ZRM’s raw backup
feature. Raw or physical backups are exact copies of your data.
This shortens the time needed for backups as well as for restores.
Calculating storage requirements ahead of time is easier since raw
backups are just a copy of your database files. However, the major
drawback of raw backups is that they can only be restored to the
identical MySQL server version and machine architecture used to
produce the original backup.

“ZRM takes advantage of filesystem and storage volume snapshots
when performing raw backups. Snapshots capture changes to your data
at a given point in time without having to copy the entire
filesystem or volume. As noted in the Plugin Framework section
above, ZRM supports filesystem snapshots for NetApp SnapManager,
Solaris ZFS, Veritas VxFS, as well as storage volume snapshots for
Linux LVM, Windows VSS, and EMC CLARiiON SnapView.

“Logical backups should be considered if you need to support
multiple machine architectures and your data must be highly
portable. Logical backups offer table level granularity and can be
performed without taking the MySQL server offline. However, logical
backups are slower because MySQL server must fetch the database
structure and content and then convert the data into a logical
format, usually a text file with SQL statements. Due to the
conversion, storage requirements for logical backups may be larger
than the size of the original data source. To offset the conversion
overhead, ZRM can be configured to compress, using gzip or other
compression tools, the backup images produced.”

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